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Unlike any other city on the Tour de Fat circuit, Charlie and I were able to pull our equipment via two bicycle + trailers to the Fort Collins stop. As we rolled up to the new location at Civic Center Park, the space felt enormous and I realized quickly it was mainly due to the absence of cars rolling around. City streets and parking lots take up a significant amount of our urban environment, and once the cars are gone it's like a different planet. I knew all this empty space would be filled with costumes, people, and bicycles the next day, and my visions of a bicycle-dominated world birthed small sinister laughs as we set up our Apocalyptic Newsies homebase.
We make newspapers and books and run a small bookstore. The Tour de Fat gets us out of our safe, papery environs, and puts us directly in front of beer drinking, bike-loving, good-time having people. We're always fairly low to the ground, even in our wildest performances atop the Water World bicycle, or hawking newspapers to the masses, and the line between patrons and performers blurs and smears like a child's watercolor. Throughout the day we talked about humanure, water conservation and place-based knowledge and above all, books and bicycles. We hung out and got to know each other, like it was a huge family renunion--huge as in 15,000+ family members--and all of us were the cousins you've heard about but had yet to meet. By the end of the day we're slapping each other on the back and toasting to the glory of all these bike-loving people. "Bicycle Army Invades City," the paper we made for the event shouts continuously, and never has a headline been more true than when the TDF is in Fort Collins.
Beyond anything I can articulate, bicycles are the religion that holds our visions of the future together. May we all go forth to conquer the other 364 days of the year when we don't the have the Tour de Fat at our backs.
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